He looked up. “Thanks. It belonged to my dad. My mom dug it out from somewhere a couple of weeks ago because she thought it would fit me.” He smiled. “I know it doesn’t, but it’s cool to have something of his.”
That was so sweet. I couldn’t imagine my dad dying, and I was sure that if he did I would want to wear his T-shirts too. “You ready to walk to history?” I asked.
He got up so fast he knocked the table, and a kid on the end said, “Watch it.” Daniel just ignored him, and we walked out of the cafeteria together.
Comprehension
On the bus home that day, Brie asked me, “So what’s up with you and Daniel Florez? Do you like him?”
“He’s okay. Don’t tell me you’re starting to act like Chelsea and go all ballistic on the poor guy. He may be a geek but he’s all right.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So have you heard anything from Military Boy lately?” That was always good for shifting Brie’s attention.
“He scored really well in target practice,” she said proudly. “He hit his target in all the important places. Did you know that you can break the body down in to different zones based on how easily a shot there can kill someone?”
“And you’re worried about me hanging around with Daniel?” I asked. “Do you ever listen to yourself, Brie?”
“I’m just trying to develop some common interests with him.”
I thought about Daniel reading all those Jane Austen books because I had mentioned them to him. Was he doing the same thing Brie was? “What about books? He must be taking English too, right? What’s he reading?”
She shook her head. “He finished English last year. This year he’s studying military theory, calculus, biology, and European history. And he’s on the drill team.”
She launched into a description of the kinds of commands he had to memorize and be able to perform, and I zoned out. Daniel did like me; that was clear. But did I like him? I just didn’t know. I still thought he was hella cute, especially when he pushed a strand of his wavy hair back over his ear, or he smiled and this light shone out of his eyes.
But I was determined not to moon over him the way Brie did for Military Boy. And if Daniel ever told me about target practice, I was so changing my seat in math class.
After that day I felt like Chelsea was watching me, and just out of basic perversity I made a point of being extra nice to Daniel. I was also curious to see what would happen. I kind of liked him; he was interesting, when he didn’t ramble too much about arcane crap, and he was polite and charming and his accent gave me little shivers.
About a week later we were filing into math class and Daniel said, “How is your netbook working out?”
“Great. Sometimes it does this weird thing where it makes the screen really small, without my ever doing anything, but I figured out how to get it back to normal.”
“All the software working out?” he asked, as he slid into his seat.
“Yeah. My dad is still freaked out by Office 2010, though. Sometimes I hear him working in the study and it’s like he’s asking the computer questions or yelling at it.”
“Yeah, a lot of people do that.”
Mr. Iccanello rapped his pointer against the board. “Settle down, class. Today we’re going to review for your first test, on Thursday.”
Everyone groaned. I hadn’t been paying as much attention as I should have been, spending a lot of time in math class thinking about Daniel, and I was seriously afraid of failing. By the end of class I was freaking out. As I stood up and gathered my crap, I said to Daniel, “They shouldn’t let him give tests senior year. I mean, we’ve already got our college applications in, right? Who cares how we do in math?”
“Do you want to study together?”
Over his shoulder I saw Chelsea staring. “Sure. That’d be great. But I don’t want you to have to come all the way to my house. I can come to yours.”
“It’s no big deal. I could ride the bus with you tomorrow, and then maybe you could drive me home again.”
He smiled, and I remembered the last time I had driven him home, when he’d kissed my cheek. Chelsea was whispering something to Mindy and I felt kind of warm inside. “Yeah, I can do that,” I said.
I usually sat with Brie on the bus, at least when we both took the regular bus home. Once a week I stayed after school to work on the literary magazine with Miss Margolis, Kate Marsh, Lashonda Jackson, and a couple of others kids, and once a week Brie’s mother picked her up and took her to piano lessons. On Wednesday, though, Daniel sat on the bench next to me, and when Brie got on instead of sitting in front of us or in back of us, she made a point of sitting on the other side of the bus, up toward the front.
Robbie was one of the last kids to get on, like usual. And probably just to annoy me, instead of scrambling to the back of the bus where his friends were, he sprawled into the seat in front of Daniel and me. He turned around to us and put his arm on the seat back.
“You coming to our house?” he asked Daniel, ignoring me completely.
Daniel nodded. “We have a math test tomorrow. We’re going to study together.”
The Big Mistake snickered, and said, “Study.”
I knocked him in the head. “Turn around, doofus.”
“So are you, like, dating Missy?” he asked.
“Melissa,” I said. “My name is Melissa. Do you have a speech defect to go along with your many brain defects?”
Daniel didn’t say anything, and Robbie hopped up and went back to his friends. I was glad that the bus hit a bump as he was moving and he nearly fell on his ass.
“It’s nice you have a brother,” Daniel said. “I wish I had a brother or a sister.”
“Oh, no you don’t. It’s horrible. They should have drowned him at birth.” I was uncomfortably aware that Daniel was sitting very close to me, just the way he had when I’d driven him home. But we were in public, on the school bus. I nudged him. “Move over,” I said. “You’re locking me in over here.”
He looked at me and there was pure mischief in his eyes, but he moved about an inch away.
I sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon.
My mom was still at work when we got home, so the Big Mistake thought he was in charge. Wrong.
“Now, Melissa, I want you to keep your bedroom door open,” he said. “And one foot on the floor at all times.”
“Where do you get this crap?” I asked.
“It was in a movie last week.”
“I saw that,” Daniel said. “A girls’ boarding school, right? And the house mother was this old lady with a wart on her nose.”
“Remember that scene in the bathroom?” Robbie asked. “When those two girls were fighting?”
“That was hot,” Daniel said.
“Okay, this conversation is getting too weird,” I said. “Robbie, if you don’t leave us alone, I’m going to tell Mom and Dad you’re watching inappropriate movies.”
“Okay, okay, keep your pants on,” he said, flopping on the couch. “I’ll be out here with the sound turned up really loud so I can’t hear you making out.”
I turned bright red. “Come on, Daniel. We have math to study.”
I pulled a chair in from Robbie’s room so we could both sit at my desk. We opened our textbooks, and I handed Daniel one earpiece from my iPod touch and turned on My Chemical Romance. We sat there caddy-cornered to each other, both of us reading math, his eyes zooming across the page in that weird way.
After I had read for a while I came to a problem about binomials, which completely befuddled me. That must have been one of the days I zoned out on Iccanello’s lectures. “I don’t get this,” I said, pointing at the problem.
Daniel pulled out the earpiece and looked at it. “It’s not hard,” he said. “You just have to split it up into its component parts.”
He grabbed a pad and started writing. “See, first you try to isolate x, so you can solve for it.”
I listened as he explained, and then
tried a problem myself, and I thought I got it. I smiled. “Thanks.” I handed him the earpiece back and we returned to studying.
We worked like that until I heard my mother’s car in the driveway. “Daniel’s helping me study math,” I said, greeting her as she walked in the door, Daniel hovering behind me. “Can he stay for dinner?”
“Is it all right with your mother?” my mom asked him.
“She works until nine,” he said. “I usually get my own dinner during the week.”
My mother frowned. She was big on all four of us eating dinner together every night. She said it prevented the Big Mistake and me from becoming juvenile delinquents. I think it was too late for him, though.
By dinner time, I felt like I could actually pass the exam on Thursday. Daniel sat across from me, and I was afraid the Big Mistake was going to keep on teasing us. I had one leg primed to kick him, but he was strangely silent.
“So, Daniel, how is your semester going?” my father asked.
“Pretty good. I’m caught up on all my reading and I think Melissa and I are going to ace our math test tomorrow.”
“Melissa can memorize things very well, but she has trouble applying what she learns,” my father said.
“Dad.”
“It’s true, sweetheart. Remember last year in chemistry? You memorized every formula, but you still didn’t do that well on your final exam.”
I turned to Daniel. “I got a B. That was a huge disappointment to my father.”
“I just want to you do as well as you can, sweetheart.”
“I’m like that too, sometimes,” Daniel said. “I can read everything and understand it but I need to practice in order to do well on a test.” He looked down at his plate, which he had already cleaned of the gluten-free macaroni and cheese casserole. “I just finished driver ed, but I’m worried I won’t pass my license test.”
“Just practice,” my father said. “That was the secret with Melissa. You have to get behind the wheel and build up those sense memories.” He held his hands at the ten o’clock and two o’clock positions and mimed turning the wheel. I thought I might die of embarrassment.
“That’s the problem. My mother has no car, so the only practice I’ve been able to get has been with the school cars. And now I won’t be able to drive them anymore.”
“We can do something about that,” my father said. “Melissa, why don’t you go out with Daniel this weekend? You can take your mom’s car.”
“I have errands to run all weekend, Richard.”
“Saturday afternoon,” my father said. “I’ll run you around in my car, Caroline.”
I looked from my mother to my father. I didn’t know which one I wanted to win. Usually I side with my father in any argument against my mom, even if it’s against my own interests, just on general principle. But I kind of wanted to spend some time with Daniel, and I did feel like I owed him a couple of favors by then.
“Fine,” my mother said.
We agreed that I would pick Daniel up at ComputerCo at four and take him to the high school, which had big parking lots people often used for driving practice.
Through the rest of the meal, my father peppered him with computer questions. By the time dinner was over Daniel had agreed to show my dad how to defrag his computer and give him some tips for using Word that would improve his productivity.
After dinner Daniel trailed behind my dad into the study, and I hovered in the doorway as Daniel walked him through some stuff he had read in the Word manual when he had some free time. It was about as big as the Bible, so it probably took him an hour or so.
“Wow, I never realized there were so many keyboard shortcuts,” my father said, shaking his head, after Daniel had lectured him for a while. “I need to write these down.”
Daniel started the defrag process on the laptop, and then my father gave me his car keys. “Drive carefully. You’re going to have to set a good example for Daniel.”
I groaned. But what the hell, I was getting to drive the Mercedes again, and that was hella cool. As we were threading our way through the local streets of Stewart’s Crossing, I saw Chelsea standing in front of her house talking on her cell phone. I slowed, rolled the window down and waved at her. Her mouth gaped open.
I didn’t need Daniel’s directions to get back to his apartment building. I pulled up and put the car in park. Then I turned it off. I was always scared I was going to accidentally hit something that would make the car take off.
“This was really nice,” Daniel said. “Like being part of a family.”
It was like an arrow had pierced my heart. Poor Daniel. All the things that Brie and Chelsea and I took for granted were the Emerald City for him. “My family likes you too.” I leaned over and kissed his cheek.
He turned and kissed me back, our lips just touching. I had kissed boys before, just so I wouldn’t turn into some kind of old maid by the time I was eighteen, but kissing Daniel was different. He didn’t try to force his tongue into my mouth, the way Richie Prior had tried after the spring formal. Instead, we just pressed our lips gently against each other and I inhaled his scent, Irish Spring overlaid with something deeper, something essentially Daniel.
He pulled back after a while. “Thank you for the dinner and the drive home.”
“I should thank you for helping me study. I really feel like I understand the math now.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” He opened the car door, then leaned over and kissed me one last time on the cheek. As he walked away I sat back and smiled like an idiot.
Driver Ed
I was sure Daniel aced the math test, and I was pretty sure I did well myself. Even better, I heard Chelsea comparing answers with Brie and realized that Chelsea had gotten a lot of questions wrong.
Daniel and I still didn’t do anything overt at school, but I was starting to feel like he could be my boyfriend. I just prayed I would never get so goofy over him the way that Brie mooned for Military Boy. That would be so not me, and my mother had always told me that I should never feel like I had to change who I was for a boy.
Oh, God, I was starting to listen to my mother’s advice. I was really in trouble.
Saturday afternoon as I was getting ready to leave my father gave me a couple of bills and said, “Take Daniel to dinner when you finish. He’s a nice kid.”
It had been gray and gloomy in the morning, with a drizzle of rain, but by four o’clock it had cleared up and the sun was out. A few trees were starting to turn color, and some people had fall decorations in their yards—scarecrows and bundles of Indian corn and the occasional pumpkin. Driving the mom-mobile was nowhere near as fun as driving Dad’s Mercedes, but it was still great to feel like I was totally in control of my destiny. I could play anything on the radio, run the air conditioner and have the windows open at the same time if I wanted.
I got to ComputerCo a few minutes early and went inside to browse the cell phone accessories. Daniel came over and said, “I can clock out in five more minutes.”
“No rush. I need a new pair of headphones. Which of these is better?”
For once his encyclopedic nerdiness came in handy. He knew all the specs for each pair of headphones, and we figured out which was the best for what I wanted. While I went up to the register to pay he went in the back to clock out, and we met in the parking lot.
“You want to drive over to the high school?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, you drive there.” Even when we pulled in, he wasn’t that eager to get in the driver’s seat. He kept asking me what all the dials were, how easy the car shifted and all that sort of stuff.
It was interesting to see something Daniel wasn’t good at. He had been a star in English, math, and history—but that was because success in those classes was all about reading, memorizing and understanding, and he could do that. But driving was totally different. I finally got him to switch seats with me. I could just imagine telling my father that the whole time I was with Daniel all we did was
sit in the car and look at the dashboard.
“It’s like I know in my brain what I’m supposed to do,” he said, carefully shifting the mom-mobile into drive. “But my body still doesn’t know.”
“I had the opposite problem,” I said. “I sat over in the driver’s seat and I was like, okay, I’m ready to go, and I’d be reaching for stuff and pressing on stuff and my dad would be like, no, Melissa, that’s the cigarette lighter, not the gear shift.”
He pulled forward a bit jerkily, like he was afraid to press the gas pedal. “Use a constant pressure,” I said.
Then I realized that I had totally channeled my father, and it freaked me out. The only difference was that he would have added ‘sweetheart’ to the end of the sentence, and there was no way I was using that word with Daniel. It also made me feel bad that Daniel didn’t have a father to tell him those kind of things. The Big Mistake had finally started shaving a couple of months ago, and I remembered my dad showing him how. Who taught Daniel? His cheek was smooth, but I could see he had a faint beard shadow.
We drove along one edge of the lot, and I had Daniel do a three-point turn at the end. Then we went back to where we had started. It was strange driving over the lot without regard to any of the parking lines, but there were no other cars there so it didn’t matter.
Daniel started to gain confidence the more we went back and forth. “My dad gave me some money for dinner,” I said when it was starting to get dark. “You want to go?”
“Sure, that would be nice. But you have to drive. I’m exhausted.”
I laughed. He had driven the mom-mobile up and down for about an hour and he was exhausted? Then I remembered when I was first learning to drive, how I focused every fiber of my being on doing that one thing, and how tired I was afterward.
“After that performance, you didn’t think I was going to let you drive my mom’s car on the road, did you?” I asked, as he came to a jerky stop. “That has to wait at least until next week.”
“So you’ll keep on teaching me?” he said, putting the gearshift in park with a sense of relief.
Soul Kiss Page 4